Your Biggest English Language Gripes

Other peoples' posts keep on making me think of more uses I dislike. "Medalling"/"medalled" as used endlessly by BBC pundits in the context of the Olympics etc.

New words invented or used to replace an existing (and often less clumsy one) do concern me, e.g. the BBC's puzzling use of "listenership" instead of "audience" and "transportation" (and many other US uses) instead of "transport".

Then there's adding unnecessarily to quite satisfactory and long-standing words such as "station-stop" on trains instead of "station" and so on. Though a cynic might think that given how poor some services are, that might be to distinguish scheduled stops from unexpected and unexplained delays in the middle of nowhere...

As for TOCs ceasing to refer to "passengers" in favour of "customers", again I suspect that's because passengers might actually hope or expect to travel somewhere, which these days is no certainty. Or maybe it's due to the monetisation of everything.

I hate the word artisan (and the very clumsy sounding artisanal) - not the word itself, and it's true meaning, but it's now used indiscriminately to indicate often a spurious, faux authenticity and usually with an unjustified price hike over something else that is supposedly more mass-produced.

Also, it now seems that if you stick the word 'craft' in front of anything you want to drink or eat, a similar smug, superiority of quality and purpose is implied. This obviously comes from craft beer (I still prefer proper real ale myself) but I've now seen the ludicrous term craft coffee at some cafes in London.

Pacific for specific.

And don't even start me on the huge percentage of the population that seems to think the plural of anything we commonly use abbreviated letters for (CDs, LPs, DVDs etc.) should be in the possessive, ie. CD's, LP's, DVD's.....no no no no no no NO!

 

I so agree.

Anybody at work who says that... even worse. 

There's an excellent YouTube clip about this from David Mitchell with another one about the almost as annoying 'going forward.'

I'm super hungry/tired/happy/excited right now

and the pretentious use of 'bespoke.'

There was a time when only tailors used the expression but now anything that's a little bit individual is bespoke.

bespoke kitchens

bespoke itineraries 

bespoke insurance policy

This might be a tad off the topic of the language as such but one of mine would be getting well-known sayings wrong, such as "it was a bit of a damp squid"

walked past a sign today advertising hand crafted somethings, well I looked what it was it was sandwiches, is this why my sandwiches are a bit naff because I don't craft them?!